Choosing sides

[supergee]

I’ve been a First Amendment Nut as long as I can remember. Back in the day when the battles were over sexual verbiage and descriptions, that meant defending the likes of Henry Miller & D.H. Lawrence on principle and because those who wanted to suppress them were worse.

Now it’s Julian Assange, a shit disturber who gets his kicks spilling secrets, whether it’s American war crimes or the names of closeted gay people in countries where outing could mean death. Again, the principle and the opponents. In traditional diplomatic parlance, he’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son a bitch.

Comments

[dewline]

I think making freedom of speech look like a sin is indeed that man's goal now. My next question: at whose insistence? His own?

[legionseagle]

Given the pattern of the emails he leaked and those he didn't, I think the answer to that is tolerably clear. The man's a Putin asset whether he knows it or not.

That said, I'd defend him (well, not me personally, don't have the skillset, not my area of law, also I make a point of avoiding acting for people who leave a string of unpaid lawyers behind, all of whom they badmouth) against the extradition to the US on the basis that the assumed facts (on considering an indictment request, one always takes the position that one assumes that the prosecuting state can make out the case on the facts they rely on) only just about scramble over the bar for a corresponding offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and it's an inchoate one at that. On the other hand if the Swedish prosecutors come back into the ring, I'd be backing them up to the hilt.

[dewline]

Understood.